


Photographs of Regret (one-shot)

by sonmi



Category: Dramione - Fandom, Harry Potter - Fandom, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Draco Malfoy - Freeform, F/M, Harry Potter - Freeform, Malfoy Manor, The Deathly Hallows, dramione - Freeform, hermione granger - Freeform, ron weasley - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 06:47:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5957641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonmi/pseuds/sonmi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years later, after the Second Wizarding War is finished and won, Draco Malfoy is feels like a ghost. Like a slideshow, his memories are imprinted on the backs of his eyelids—memories of her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Photographs of Regret (one-shot)

Draco Malfoy’s memory is like a photo album. Each experience is neatly filed, snapshots of his life organized across his mind. He can remember the sweet wrappers strewn across the plush seats of the Hogwarts Express, trunks rattling overhead, when Potter denied his friendship in favour of the blood traitor Weasley. His eleven-year-old self could still feel the sting from the slight. 

He’s got all sorts of memories collected of the Weasel, too. There’s the time in second year when Weasley’s wand backfired and he vomited slugs at the Slytherin Quidditch Team’s feet. Or when Draco snuck up on him with Crabbe and Goyle when he was apparently alone at the Shrieking Shack, slushy snow skidding under their trainers—only he wasn’t alone—and Potter threw mud at him from under his stupid invisibility cloak. 

Granger doesn’t have a first photograph in Draco’s life like Potter and Weasley do, but she does have many others. Draco vaguely remembers her at the Sorting ceremony; she was almost a Hatstall, after all; but by the first month he’d got a good enough picture of her: a Mudblood, and a bloody annoying one at that. 

It was easy to hate her when they were young. It sort of an uplifting feeling, being able to turn his frustration onto someone else. Potter was a great target, obviously, strutting around like a hero, teachers bowing at his feet, classmates kissing the hems of his robes. Potter had a little too much arrogance and popularity for something he couldn’t even remember. Draco hated Weasley’s hair and his snubby nose and the way he dumbly stuttered when called upon in class; all in all, it wasn’t hard to feel irritation when being within a hundred feet of the Weasel. But it was a different kind of anger directed at her, not hot and vindictive like it was with the others, but prickly. His stomach would twist when he saw Granger, but he couldn’t describe why—he couldn’t define it like he could with the rest. He’d always just stuck with the idea that it was because she always beat him in every class and she was a Mudblood, two truly unforgivable things. 

  
ϕ  


Draco smiles a little every time he thinks of the time she punched him in their third year. It’s nice that day, with golden clouds scudding across the evening sky, the trees in the Forbidden Forest swaying in a still-chilly breeze. When she hits him it doesn’t feel like a regular punch—it feels like he’s been hit by the Whomping Willow. It’s probably because Granger’s a girl, and he’s never been punched by a girl before. But every time he calls her a Mudblood after that—even in private conversations—it gets a little bit harder to make the words come out. 

  
ϕ  


He’s pretty sure the Yule Ball gets a whole page devoted to Granger because that’s when everything starts going south very quickly. Parkinson coaxes him into going with her, but Draco isn’t too excited, not really; he’s never been a party kind of person. If the food’s good, it might be worth it. When Parkinson points to the girl standing next to Krum—he assumed she was in Beauxbatons because all of them seemed to be so pretty—and hisses, “Bloody hell, is that Granger?” he feels like something much bigger than the Whomping Willow—like the size of Hogwarts—has crashed into him. Food became the last thing on his mind: he can’t stop looking at her, he can’t stop noticing the way she smiles at Krum, he can’t help staring as she’s fighting with Weasley, and he can’t help the way his stomach twists into a couple more knots. It makes him so angry he punches a wall a couple hours later and spends Christmas Day nursing a sore hand and a bad mood. 

  
ϕ  


Throughout their fifth year he feels invisible to her, and tries to deny that it bothers him when it really does. He sometimes looks up across the dungeon, her face shimmering through the cauldron fumes and her wild hair more frizzy and crazy than before—and then he looks away quickly, hoping no one’s noticed him staring. Deep down Draco knows he’s being stupid; his father’s preaching the “dawn of a new age” and he knows Hermione’s got no future in that world. He’ll have no future, either, if he keeps thinking about her this much. 

  
ϕ  


He’s lying in a half-awake agony in the Hospital Wing after Potter attacked him in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom. The hospital sheets are cool against his skin, but the cuts lacerating his body burn. Draco’s head is pounding and he hears the door creak; for some insane reason he wonders if Granger’s here to visit him. Better reasoning tells him it’s not, of course it’s not, and his eyes inexplicably fill with tears. 

“Fucking hell,” Draco whispers, rolling over so the pain from his twisting cuts can distract him. 

After spending the entire year trying to focus on his task—to get her out of his head so he can concentrate—he knows it’s impossible. What if the Death Eaters kill her, accidentally or not, when they invade Hogwarts? She’s a Gryffindor, of course she’ll be on the front line doing something stupidly heroic with Potter and Weasley. But more likely: he’ll fail, the Dark Lord will kill him, and Hermione will be safe for the time being, until the darkness inevitably conquers the light. 

  
ϕ  


If Draco didn’t think he was doomed before she was dragged into Malfoy Manor, he certainly knows he is afterward. He’s disappointed to see Weasley and Potter, believe it or not, but then when he sees her behind dragged in, a dark bruise blooming on her cheek— 

The world pauses for a couple moments as a seven-ton block of ice slides down into his stomach and settles comfortably over his abdomen. If there were a wizard god, Draco would swear that he’s being tested. If it’s a test, he fails it. 

He can see Potter’s eyes widen when he forces out a half-assed, lukewarm lie: “It might be.” Draco wants to scream at Potter: “I’m not doing it for you! I’m doing it for her! You bloody idiots had to get yourselves captured!” But he doesn’t say anything. 

He thinks he’s going to go crazy when Aunt Bellatrix tortures her. Everything that he’s had to do at the Dark Lord’s bidding, all the horrors that he’s witnessed—nothing, nothing, is as terrible as this. Hermione’s screams ricochet inside his skull; he doesn’t think he can bear looking at her writhing on the floor any longer but can’t look away; he’s got a burning urge to Avada Kedavra Bellatrix squarely in the centre of her turned back; tears quietly carve salty trails down his hollow cheeks, invisible in the dim light of the manor. 

The dim room has gone silent. Blood is dribbling out of “Mudblood” branded into her arm—he wishes he could tell her how much he hates that word, how much he wishes he’d never called her that in their second year—when her head turns, hair splayed out on the floor, and she looks at him. The candlelight glints in her half-lidded, teary eyes; eyes cracking with betrayal. She’s never seemed so invaluable to him before, and never more has he wanted to rip his heart out so he can’t feel how much it hurts. The look she gives him haunts him forever; the tiniest fraction of trust they’d had, however small, is gone, and she leaves his universe forever. 

  
ϕ  


He stands with his eleven-year-old son on the Platform. Potter and his friends are a hundred yards away, talking jovially. Draco nods at Potter, and Potter nods back. His stomach twinges familiarly when he sees Hermione fussing over her daughter’s electric orange hair—Weasley hair. Scorpius sees him staring. “Dad, is that Harry Potter? You went to school with him, right?” 

Draco nods. 

“Who’s that?” His son is pointing at Hermione. 

His stomach twists more forcefully and he has to look away. He doesn’t know how to give an answer that does her justice. Finally, Draco replies, “The brightest witch of our age.” Her hair is slightly less stormy than in their Hogwarts days, and a little bit shorter, but still perceptible through the haze of steam, black robes, and hooting owls. 

Snapshots of her are all the same—wishful, tenacious, and full of regret.

**Author's Note:**

> hello!! i haven't posted in a while, but i've been sitting on this one for a long time. please comment, like, etc. your support & comments & feedback are very much appreciated! :-)


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